“From day 1, internet access on every construction site”

BAM Belgium is the biggest construction company of our country. To provide its construction sites with internet access, the building giants rely on Venn Telecom. “Venn solved three problems for us. And we had to explain them only once”, says Pieter Thewis, BAM Belgium’s ICT manager.

BAM Belgium is the Belgian branch of the Dutch Royal BAM Group, which is also operating in Germany, England and Ireland. BAM Belgium has approximately 2100 employees. It has an annual turnover of around € 1 billion. Famous projects built by BAM Belgium include the new NATO building in Brussels and the MAS museum and the new Port House in Antwerp.

A company like BAM has construction sites all over the country and frequently encounters the same problems. “All those sites are managed using computers. The building plans, the monitoring of the budget, it all happens through the internet. We use Proximus Explore. Within that network, we have our own protected ‘internet island’. It’s an easy way to share the necessary information with all our construction sites. However, Explore has one important weakness: we need to announce no less than eight weeks in advance where we need a fixed line. You understand eight weeks is like an eternity, given the time pressure that goes along with our projects. So we were looking for a solution to bridge this two-month start-up period.”

Ready-made solutions

Thewis read about Venn Telecom in a specialist magazine and decided to contact the company based in Vilvoorde. Contacting Venn was a real breakthrough. “The people of Venn proved immediately they are at home in the construction industry. Right away, they presented us ready-made solutions. In our site trailer Venn installed a router that uses not just one mobile service provider, but several of them. Automatically, the Venn router chooses the best network and the best bandwidth. And because they put more than one sim card in the router, the data speed of all these cards is combined. Since then we have, from day 1, a decent internet connection on every construction site.”

In an asphalt factory in the middle of nowhere,BAM Belgium encountered a second problem. “Proximus could only provide us with a very slow internet connection. The other providers didn’t have a better solution. Venn did. They topped up the slow internet connection with a router equipped with 4G technology. From that moment on, we had a decent speed in our Walloon factory. With this simple procedure, Venn solved another problem.”

The third problem was met by BAM Track, a specialist in railway works. “Their construction sites are constantly moving. For a fixed line, you would need a really, really long wire. That’s impossible. Venn places a router in the mobile works shed and our railway workers have a steady internet connection all the time.”

Direct line via the Venn router

Recently, Venn started to offer a direct link with a company’s own system through their routers. “Today, our employees on construction sites can only log in to the BAM system by using an application. With Venn’s innovation, this intermediate step would be eliminated. Plus the security would be improved”.

BAM is impressed by Venn’s solutions, but also by its service. “If we contact them, we get someone on the line who really understands us. We explain our problem only once and the next day it is solved.” As a client, you can’t ignore that.